For the first time Facebook has mentioned its own number for comments that were removed. In the last month in Germany, around 100,000 content items with hateful comments and insults were deleted, said Facebook's European policy director, Richard Allan. However the company did not publish details of how many messages were complained about as a whole in this period and how the number of deleted comments changed in recent months.

One of the most serious problems remains the lack of transparency, said Federal Justice Minister Heiko Maas. "We should therefore consider whether we should obligate social networks to publish how many complaints they have received about illegal hate comments and how they dealt with them," said the SPD politician.

Criminal content on the internet is still deleted "too little and too slowly," said Maas.

Here we have something truly sinister. Whether a comment is "criminal" or not is a determination that can only be made by a court. But here we have random people and agenda-driven organisations, including ethnic lobbying outfits, being encouraged to decide that for themselves and private companies being pressured into guessing whether their judgements about the supposed criminality of someone else's speech are valid.

I've never used Facebook, Twitter, or any other of these unsocial trap nets: they were set up to obtain information from gullible people, just as mobile phones, and they all exist to spy on us. There should be a world-wide boycott of these tools of control and most of them are owned and run by the usual suspects so why is anyone surprised at this shutting down of free speech in the name of 'tolerance'. We are entering a phase where people have to accept that personal, one to one, and small groups are the best form of communication, and the most difficult for the totalitarians to silence.